1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an automatic composition apparatus and method for automatically composing a melody based on melody generating templates, and a storage medium storing a program for executing the method.
2. Prior Art
An automatic composition apparatus has been conventionally known, which stores a plurality of melody generating templates that contain data needed for generating melodies such as passage structures, chord progressions, rhythm characteristics, and pitch characteristics, and automatically composes a melody of a piece of music based on a selected melody generating template.
In the prior art automatic composition apparatus, however, to increase the number or kind of melodies that can be generated, it is necessary to prepare a correspondingly increased number of melody generating templates. This is because an attempt to generate different melodies using the same melody generating template unavoidably results in melodies of a similar atmosphere having the same passage structure, chord progression, rhythm characteristic and pitch characteristic.
Thus, there is a need to prepare a large number of melody generating templates, which requires an enormous amount of labor and time as well as a huge capacity of memory to store the large number of melody generating templates.